PDF Association forms PDF/E Competence Center to support engineering and 3D applications

Berlin, Germany. The PDF Association has opened its PDF/E Competence Center to promote awareness of the ISO standard for engineering supporting the secure creation, exchange and use of engineering documents. The fifth of the PDF Association’s Competence Centers, establishes a platform for information and discussion of the benefits of PDF/E in almost every engineering field. It is intended to be a point of contact for experts in 3D technology, architects and construction specialists, as well as developers of PLM applications – in other words, for all engineers who use PDF technology as an integral component of their day-to-day work. Among other things, the Center plans to publish “PDF/E in a Nutshell”, which will cover all aspects and fields of application of this ISO standard. PDF/E, based on PDF 1.6, was certified in 2008 as ISO standard 24517-1. This standard is designed to ensure that compliant files can describe a complete model in a single PDF file. To enable this, the standard stipulates that all fonts must be embedded, and prohibits the use of external data. Because PDF/E files are self-contained and complete, they are an excellent choice for exchanging, visualizing, printing and archiving of engineering data.

PDF/E-2, a major update and enhancement to PDF/E-1 is already a formal ISO Draft International Standard (DIS) and is nearing publication. Based on PDF 2.0, PDF/E-2 extends its support for 3D formats to include ISO 14739, the “Product Representation Compact” (PRC) format. PRC is a very lightweight data format that was designed to represent CAD data defined in all the popular 3D CAD formats. Phil Spreier, Head of the PDF/E Competence Center and Technical Director of the 3D PDF Consortium, said, “This new development for PDF/E really extends the formats capabilities to archive complex 3D engineering documents: after all, more and more CAD solutions such as Autodesk® Inventor®, PTC® Creo®, Siemens PLM Software Solid Edge and Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS® MBD are able to publish 3D models as PDF files. We see a very bright future for PDF/E as an open, ISO format for visualizing, exchanging and archiving 3D engineer data.”